Wireless communication technology has evolved from a technology offering mainly voice service to a technology that also provides multimedia content. Recent advances in mobile computing and wireless communications enable transmission of rich multimedia content over wireless networks. One such advance is the use of MIMO (Multiple Input Multiple Output) communications in which multiple antennas are used at both the transmitter and the receiver for increasing data throughput without requiring additional bandwidth. Further, while MIMO configurations are usually optimized to maximize data transmission rates, with the increased demand for various different services at the application layer, achieving high reliability in addition to high data transmission rates at the physical layer (PHY) has become ever more important. However, high data rates and high reliability tend to be conflicting design parameters.
Typical wireless communications involve the transmission of a continuous source over a noisy channel. Common examples are speech communications, multimedia communications, mobile TV, mobile video and broadcast streaming. In such communications, the source is encoded and compressed into a finite stream of bits, and the bit stream is then communicated over the noisy channel. Source coding is carried out to convert the continuous source into a finite stream of bits, and channel coding is performed before transmission to mitigate the errors in the bit stream that will be introduced by the noisy channel. At the receiver end, a channel decoder recovers the bit stream from its noisy version, and a source decoder reconstructs the multimedia source from the recovered compressed version. During transmission of a multimedia communication, minimizing distortion between the original multimedia source and the reconstructed version at the receiver can provide a better multimedia experience for a user.